Paddy Johnson and Whitney Kimball

Don’t be fooled by the normal-sized events list; this is just a sampling from the half million openings available to you in Chelsea on Wednesday and Thursday and the PS1 Book Fair, which will be putting on more panels and dialogues and conversations than are humanly consumable this weekend (the zine tent alone is an afternoon’s work). A Picasso sculpture exhibition and David Zwirner’s double solo shows by Isa Genzken and Wolfgang Tillmans are just a few we think will be spamming your Facebook in weeks to come.

Every word in this sentence is gross: Lump of sperm whale puke to auction for $10,000. [Earth Touch News]

The Hyperallergic horoscopes are out. Aquarius has been told not to leave their house this month so as to avoid certain professional and romantic danger. Taurus’s have been told to follow the example of Megumi Igarashi’s vagina boat and go with the flow. [Hyperallergic]

This is by far the best and cutest video of a puppy “howling” that we have ever seen. [YouTube]

Victorian hipsters riding down the street on very large bicycles in flow blown regalia. She brushes her teeth with boar bristles. [Vox]

John Perreault, an art critic for the Village Voice and ARTnews has died at the age of 78. [ARTnews]

The Art Basel Miami exhibitor list is out: WHO CARES. [No link]

In other news, aliens spread through the universe like a disease. [Daily Mail]

Zoo security drills prepare workers in the event of an escaped animal.

Media journalist and staunch New York Times defender David Carr died suddenly last night after collapsing in the newsroom. A video of one of his finer moments, grilling the journalistic stunt style of the VICE editors. “Just because you put on a safari helmet and looked at some poop doesn’t give you the right to insult what we do.” [YouTube]

The most honest, beautiful and horrifying account of addiction we’ve ever read, by David Carr. [The New York Times]

The best slide show we have ever seen. Zoo security drills for when animals escape. Incredible. [The Atlantic]

Record prices set for Ai Weiwei and Mark Bradford last night at Phillips London. [Baer Faxt]

Also, Christie’s has acquired Collectrium, an online database management system akin to ArtBinders that helps gallerists manage their inventory and track their sales. Wonder how Christie’s will use this software. [Baer Faxt]

I have no idea what the hell is going on with this booby performance costume at the #CAA conference, but I will be investigating further. [@nikkigphd on Twitter]

GIF artist Rebecca Mock has accused Diplo of ripping one of her GIFs to promote his new song. [Dazed Digital]

Weird. A listicle on the relationship details of art world power couples because Valentine’s Day. Many of those on the list are dead. Still, stories about people brought together by shared intellectual interests is better than the usual crap. [artnet News]

Rhizome has archived VVORK! This is significant not only because VVORK was a hallmark of its time (2006-2012), but also because Rhizome has solved the problem of archiving videos from third party websites. This is a huge problem for blogs that, say, embed YouTube videos in their daily posts. More on this soon. [Rhizome]

Human Rights Watch has released another damning report on labor conditions in Abu Dhabi. In the report, HRW places the blame not only at the feet of the UAE and its agencies, but the businesses this labor supports; New York University, The Louvre and The Guggenheim. [Hyperallergic]

Christian Viveros-Faune decides that MoMA’s contemporary painting survey “Forever Now” sucks. There are so many zingers in this review they are hard to count. A few: “Each of these artists’ works is the art-fair equivalent of collector catnip…Showroom-tested and market- approved, the artists in “Forever Now” don’t so much constitute an artistic style as embody so-called zombie formalism. (Critic Walter Robinson recently coined the term to describe faux-original painting that attempts to revive the “walking corpse” of Abstract Expressionism.)…Fronted by Hoptman’s abracadabra, MOMA has endorsed the 2015 painterly equivalent of Design Within Reach.” That’s just from the first page. [The Village Voice]

For what it’s worth, when I visited Abu Dhabi this year, my UAE tour guides refused to let anyone visit the construction site of the Louvre, because they claimed Western journalists would only focus on the labor conditions. These staff were convinced that journalists only found the worst, out of date cases and chose to make an example of them. When I visited a friend at NYU Abu Dhabi, and we discussed this, I was told that while the tone of some Western journalists could be off putting, the labor conditions were a real issue and most people in this person’s circles over paid any help they had to try to correct those problems. [Paddy Johnson]

Jon Stewart has announced that he’s leaving the Daily Show after seventeen years. [Wonkette]

A recap of the talk Paddy Johnson gave at YoungArts last week. [Miami New Times]

A long debate about the virtues of having a tiny tab on your zipper pull, a leftover from the industrial process which would save thousands of man hours and dollars, but remains because it’s aesthetically unpleasing. Instead, people work eight hour shifts to assemble perfect zippers. [Bunnies Studios, via Metafilter]

Police in the Netherlands have busted an “industrial-scale” weed operation because it was the only house on the block without snow on the roof. [Gawker]

Auction world insider Josh Baer, who runs a well-known up-to-the-minute art world newsletter, broke rumors about the highest-ever art sale, a Gauguin painting, on his February 3rd newsletter:

Has the record been broken for a private art sale for a single work of art?? If its true

that the Qataris have paid $300 million for Gaugin’s “Nafea Faaipoipo”, then the wags citing low oil prices as having a big effect might have….?

The New York Times forwarded the story with a mention to Baer Faxt, but the Wall Street Journal’s Kelly Crow didn’t even give the attribution. Baer takes issue with WSJ editor Eben Shapiro and the general bad practice of ignoring the smaller outlets. [Baer Faxt newsletter 2/3/15 and 2/10/15, New York Times, Wall Street Journal]

A haunted white Macbook, only $182! The seller claims to have left the Macbook in a graveyard next to a mental institution on the night of an electrical storm, green fog clouding, and “an old crone” who was terrorizing a nearby neighborhood. Haunting followed:

How do I “know” the computer is haunted?

Well, I took the computer home (still in perfect working condition) and, folks, this is when things started to get downright weird. First, I noticed that ALL of my songs in iTunes had become scary or haunted. Second, the desktop background was changed to a scary photo. The following week, we (my wife, Barbie, and I) noticed some of our stuff around the house had been mysteriously rearranged. One night, we went out to dinner with my wife’s parents and their friends and some people from my wife’s work and some of their parents. When we came home, my baseball cards were all out of order and my wife’s rare American coins were in total disarray. To make matters spookier, I occasionally saw the computer levitating. In some cases the screen and keyboard would open and shut quickly, as though the computer were attempting to speak.

Daily Life columnist Clementine Ford started #QuestionsForMen as an outlet to record unequal expectations between genders. The distinction is obvious in the blogging business, which generally permits men to freely air emotional complaints while expecting women to steer a more rational course, or else we’re on our period. [Twitter, via Buzzfeed]

Serial killer Charles Manson has called his wedding off to Afton Elaine Burton, a woman 53 years his junior, after it emerged that she was only after him for his corpse. She was hoping to gain possession of the corpse through marriage so she and her friends could put it on display in L.A. and profit from its display. [The Independent]

The city of Atlanta might incarcerate the art student whose pinhole camera accidentally brought the highways when police suspected a bomb threat. The professor is throwing the kids under the bus by specifying that this was assigned as a “take-home” project. [artnet News]

CAA has released a “Best Practices in Fair Use” guide for artists. [Hyperallergic]

Photographer Sarah Meyohas has invented an art version of BitCoin, “Bitch coin” in which collectors buy her work at a fixed rate of one BitchCoin per 25 inches of photographic print. (It’s backed by one of Meyohas’s prints, which she’s placed in a vault). After February 15th, you’ll be able to buy Bitchcoins online. [BitchCoin]

This is the most horrible story ever. Thousands of cats crammed into a truck were rescued from being eaten in Vietnam, then they were crushed to death in a dumper truck and the thousands of survivors were buried alive. Warning: the Daily Mail link is the worst. Going vegan now forever. [Thought Catalog]

86 seals have also been murdered (between 2009 and 2014) and washed up on the coast of Scotland. Seals are suspected of cannibalism. [Discovery]

El Museo del Barrio curator Rocio Aranda-Alvarado spoke with three activists in the Bronx and said two of them hadn’t heard of the Gramsci Monument. That’s surprising considering how many people in Chelsea had. [A Blade of Grass]

Yay for art news for finding an art hook in a story about a meth lab bust. An estimated $33,000 worth of prints by Alfred Morris Momaday were discovered there. [artnet News]

Big new appointments at the Walton family’s enormous Crystal Bridges museums. Margaret C. Conrads is now the director of curatorial affairs, and Robin Groesbeck is the director of exhibitions and interactive presentations. [Artforum]

What is life like inside Mosul, an Iraqi city captured by ISIS? A Syrian source reports and Molly Crabapple creates the illustrations. [Vanity Fair via Hyperallergic]

The socially-conscious art conference Open Engagement returns, this year in Pittsburgh. We recommend strongly to get down there (see last year’s recap). [Open Engagement]

The sound of a bag of weed opening during the opening of Terminator: thejogging, now in audio form. [thejogging (but sound)]

California governor’s proposed budget would halve their arts funding. This, after having boosted arts funding last year by 5 million. Apparently this decline is a surprise to no one, since last year’s funding boom was declared a one time thing. [Hyperallergic]

Steven Soderbergh decided to re-cut 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now it is only 110 minutes. [Extension 765]

The nominations are in for the Oscars; let the betting begin! Until February 22, 2015, prepare to read about nothing else. [The Daily Beast, NPR, Flavorwire]

A review of Faye Driscoll’s dance performance, Thank You for Coming: Attendance from Benjamin Sutton. The performance, which melds shared experience and images, starts off strong, but becomes hard to follow in the last scene when the references become unclear. [Hyperallergic]

Pies and Thighs, the Williamsburg spot for pies and fried chicken, takes Manhattan. Now with doughnuts! [Grub Street]

An undercover federal agent posed as a Silk Road admin and made $1,000 a week in bitcoin. No word on whether he got to keep the money. [Motherboard]

On Amazon’s dog culture, by an insane woman who does not like dogs. [The Awl]

In boobs news, in a recent baptism speech, the Pope expressly welcomed mothers to breastfeed in the Sistine Chapel. “Give them milk,” the speech originally read, which the Pope changed to “breastfeed them”. [Wonkette]

“Is the New York Art Scene Doomed?” Yes, Ben Davis thinks. “In essence, the traditional relationship between suburb and city in American life is reversing.” I’ve drawn the same conclusion, though think that the bluechips are likely to remain where the money is. He’s guessing Detroit will be the next haven. I’d add the Catskills. [artnet News]

War has been waged over Ryder Ripps’ upcoming show “Art Ho” at Postmasters, which references heroic Ab/Ex gestures while smearing images of model Adrienne Ho. Dissidents are offended by yet another male appropriation of beauty. Defenders have called free speech. We’ve made our views known. [Facebook]

How is Carolina Miranda so good at her job? Here’s an amazing interview with Tania Bruguera, the Cuban artist arrested recently for an attempted performance about free speech in Cuba. Read all of it. [Culture: High & Low]

This is so fucked up. Worried that he didn’t have enough problems of his own to make good art, artist Joseph Gibbons, a former visiting professor at Bard and an instructor at MIT started creating them. He made two films on drug addiction and started robbing banks for “research” purposes. The stick up is bizarre: he points a camcorder at a teller and politely hands the person a note demanding a donation for his church. Exactly what threat, if any, is made in the note is unclear. [The New York Post]

Music critic Sasha Frere-Jones is leaving The New Yorker to work for Genuis.com. [Gawker]

Wow, Christopher Glazek’s annotation of his New York Times Magazine profile on Stefan Simchowitz is amazing. It sources statements in response to the piece by its subjects and responds point by point. If you’ve been following this story, reading the annotation is incredibly satisfying. [Genius]

One of our past contributors John Gawarecki-Maxwell on the conspiracy surrounding the Illuminati in WWE, and conspiracy theories in general. An entertaining read, even for those of us who don’t get the references. [Prowrestling.cool]

The dialogue continues on A Blade of Grass responding to our follow-up reporting on the Gramsci Monument. Lex Brown, who was a teacher at the monument throughout its run, feels that the Monument was something to be experienced and not analyzed with the standard critical remove. “It was a remarkable idea that came to successful fruition, through real love and real work, and beyond all the restrictions of society, identity, and politics. That reality of love and work needs to be celebrated and elevated.” [A Blade of Grass]

If artists are now aligning and identifying with small businesses (as Ben Davis and others have been advocating), then there’s a petition on Change.org calling for Mayor de Blasio to support the Small Businesses Jobs Survival Act. [Change.org]

White Castle is booking reservations for Valentine’s Day. The number is (718) 899-8404, ext. 311. [Gothamist]

If the battle is actually on between MoMA and the Met’s contemporary collection, then according to Roberta Smith, the Met’s playing its cards right. It takes a “salad” approach to Modernism rather than separating it regionally and by period. She credits Sheena Wagstaff with this turnaround, the director of the Met’s Contemporary and Modern section since 2012. [The New York Times]

Legendary Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger will close his space in the summer and New York based dealer and celebrity magnet Vito Schnabel will take over. [Artnet news]

Private giving sustains art museums. No surprises there, but the numbers are interesting. According to the Association of Art Museum Directors, the average museum goer spends $7.93 on their visit, while the museum spends $52.17. Philanthropy accounts for 33% of a museum’s budget. [Hyperallergic]

The Canadian Harper government has started a re-election fundraising campaign in response to the Paris terrorist attacks. This is being criticized by many on twitter for being exploitive and in poor taste. [Twitter]

Bieber weiner news! Apparently, unretouched photos from Bieber’s Calvin Klein shoot were released by a source who found Bieber insufferable on set. [Gawker]

Performa is organizing a tribute to Ray Johnson in November, thus prompting Randy Kennedy’s reflection on his career. “He was making work that looked like Pop in the 1950s, years before his friend and sometime rival Andy Warhol did. He was a performance artist before there was a term for such a thing….He was the father of mail art.” And in 1995 he jumped off a bridge and killed himself. No one knows why. [The New York Times]

In Paris, several hostages have now been taken by two suspects in the Charlie Hebdo murders. We are watching. [Mother Jones]

In Russia, a proposed law would take away transgendered people’s right to drive. Also, people with gambling addictions, shoplifters, the S&M community, foot fetishists, and necrophiles. [vocativ]

The infamous Brooklyn cat-kicker will not be going to jail for a year, as he could have, according to the New York Daily News. He’s now being tried for a B misdemeanor, which calls for a maximum jail sentence of 90 days. [Animal New York, via New York Daily News]

Wes Anderson’s cinematographer describes shooting nine iconic Wes Anderson-y scenes. Some interesting nuggets: He says Disney executives wanted to cut the establishing montage from Rushmore. Wes Anderson arranged all the hair on the sink in Richie’s suicide attempt scene in The Royal Tenenbaums. They filmed in different aspect ratios to set the era in The Grand Budapest Hotel. [Vulture]

JUICY: in a teaser for a Vanity Fair piece framed as a Battle of the Museums (MoMA and the Met), Glenn Lowry’s rumored to be heading to Sotheby’s from MoMA. MoMA denies rumors saying he just signed a new contract. The rest is filled with words like “blood” and “money”, and a weirdly-hyped section about MoMA’s decision whether to open its garden to the public after the next renovation. ? The piece hits stands January 13th. [Vanity Fair]

Reactive cartoons poured forth on social media yesterday in response to the shooting of colleagues from Charlie Hebdo. Intentions may have been good, but it’s a little disturbing that the Internet only ever always speeds up after a tragedy. Charlie Hebdo routinely caricatured religious figureheads like the prophet Muhammed; based on previous attacks, the press assumes that these prompted the murders. [Mashable]

Christian Viveros-Faune on Tania Bruguera’s “Tatlin’s Whisper” for artnet News. Bruguera was arrested in Cuba last Tuesday in an attempt to restage the performance first launched in 2009 for the Havana biennial in which she offered people one minute free of censorship and a loud speaker. She was subsequently released and rearrested twice and is now in custody. [Artnet News]

Christian Viveros-Faune on Sarah Thornton’s 33 Artists in 3 Acts. The book gets a thumbs down for being too nice to its subjects. That’s disappointing. 7 Days in the Art World was pretty great relative to what’s being described here. We’ll be reading the book ourselves and report back. [The Village Voice]

Does cynicism forego people’s ability to understand Thomas Hirschhorn’s housing project monuments/philosophically oriented community centers? A Blade of Grass has sourced a series of responses to our Gramsci Monument follow-up piece last year, including commentary from Anna Dezeuze, art historian and author of a book on Hirschhorn’s work; Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, curator at El Museo del Barrio; and Lex Brown, who taught and worked at the monument. Thrilled to have this conversation continued. [A Blade of Grass]

In case you missed it, bloggers have been jumping on Russell Crowe after he advised female actors over 40 to seek age-appropriate roles in order to find more work. That’s assuming that lots of those roles exist, but the desire for them is not totally ageist. Meryl Streep agrees. [Vanity Fair]